Alpha Bravo Delta Bravo

“Desyat, Vosem, Delta, Shest, Dva, Alpha, Devyat, Indigo, Dvadtsat, Sierra, Tri, Pyat, Yankee.”

I became an amateur radio enthusiast in 1997. After my older brother taught me about how the Russians used short wave radio communication in order to commit acts of espionage in the frigid depths of the Cold War. They started with a header, a tone, code word or phrase that would denote the beginning of the instruction. Followed by a string of numbers and letters that the receiver would be able to decode. Numbers stations, the home of these signals, could be based anywhere in the world, using any number of frequencies at any time of the day. And anyone, including myself, could tune in to listen. Even if I couldn’t understand what it was that I was listening to. 

He went missing in the summer of 1998. Suicide, they told my grieving parents, but they never found a body.

I turned the knob on my busted up old radio, nudging the thin red dial slightly over the channels to align just right. What was previously a faint crackling voice of a text to speech computer interspersed with discordant tones now that little bit more coherent. 4625 Khz was the exact right frequency for this particular numbers station, but my radio never liked to linger on it for too long. The dial would slip over the hours until Daisy’s voice faded into static. 

I don’t know that the person sending these signals was actually called Daisy, but the header for this particular signal was always the noise of crashing waves and the same letters read out in the NATO alphabet in between the cyrillic numbers: Delta, Alpha, Indigo, Sierra, Yankee. Daisy. 

I adjusted my headphones and closed my eyes to try and listen to Daisy better.

“Pyatnadtzat, Syem, Echo, Oscar, Vosem, Vosem, Tango.” A chime meant the word or sentence was done and another phrase would begin. My pencil scratched down every word in my notebook, careful not to miss one. The whole thing would repeat multiple times an hour, looping until Daisy gave the full instruction to the stranger experiencing this alongside me, the one supposed to be tuned in to 4625Khz.

“Odin, Tri, Odin, Dva, Hotel, Whiskey, Hotel, Whiskey, Hotel, Whiskey, Hotel–” The radio crackled with a loud high pitched ringing, and Daisy stuttered over her words. The oceanic interstitial of waves crashing into rocks played and then abruptly cut off before the salt spray could fizz out over the surface. I paused, adjusted the dials, and fussed with the antenna, thinking it strange the broadcast had ended after just 45 seconds. Daisy’s communications were always longer than that, always multiple sentences, five minutes or more of airtime cycling through until the clock chimed the hour.

“Hotel Whiskey,” I murmured, writing it down diligently. I had given up on trying to decode her messages long ago. I was no code breaker. But Hotel Whiskey felt more specific, and my brain got stuck on it. 

HW. Why did that sound familiar? I thought back to school, sitting in a cramped computer lab being taught how to code for the first time, a bunch of bored students throwing paper at each other when the teacher wasn’t looking. There was something every one of us learned first though, and at least I still remembered. How to send a message, and how to get your code to respond to it.

“Hello World.”

Daisy crackled and popped before she steadily gave off more strings of code, this time without the stuttering, totally calm and almost seeming bored as the numbers sounded out, and when the waves crashed over the radio I leaned back in my chair and let out a breath, rolling my shoulders back and twitching at the pop crunch of joints. It seemed hours had passed with me sitting there. I flexed my hand, and it didn’t want to move, too stiff from the tension running through me. I forced it to reach out and shut off the radio anyway, and blessed silence rushed in. Some food, some water, and some sleep was what I needed.

***

“Odin, Vosem, Delta, Nol, Pyatnadstat, Alpha, Devyat, Sem, Indigo, Shest, Sierra, Chetyre, Sto, Yankee.”

I awoke blearily and wondered if I was still dreaming, my sleeping thoughts surrounding the radio and the voices in it, telling me things I was desperate to understand, as well as truths I simply did not want to hear. Glimpses of my brother, always out of reach, telling me he was still out there, waiting, rotting, asking me to find him. To rot too. 

It wasn’t unusual for me to wake up randomly in the night—I had never slept well, but this was different from my regular broken sleep cycle. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. While I was patting around on my nightstand for my glasses, that familiar voice cut through the darkness, like twin hands reaching out to grasp at me from my bed.

“Odin, Tri, Odin, Dva, Hotel, Whiskey, Hotel, Whiskey, Hotel, Whiskey, Pyat, Pyat, Pyat–”

Daisy’s voice crackled through the darkness from my radio, a dim green light blinking from the power indicator, as if I had never turned her off. But I knew that I had. I remembered switching the radio off, too unsettled by understanding something that she had said to want to continue listening. The sheets were tangled up around my legs and immobilised me for a moment before I managed to wrestle free. I slipped out of bed and went to turn the radio off again, but the light on the side that normally flickered green or red was dark. I bent down under the desk and felt around with my fingers for the plug socket. Once I felt the power switch, I turned it off and pulled the plug out completely for good measure. The chiming stopped, the voice stopped, everything stopped. I rested my head against the cool wooden table leg and tension leaked out of my body all at once. 

I needed to spend some time away from Daisy.

***

Exhaustion hung over my head like a grey veil, dragging my eyes shut in long slow blinks as I hurried to the tube station, running late of course. I had spent half the night worrying about what I had heard on my radio, and the other half hearing it all over again. 

I scurried down the steps with my bag slung over my shoulder, and it smacked into my hip with every bounce.  The din of a hundred people shouting at their phones, at each other, at the station staff trying to perform crowd control, was a welcome change from the solitude of my bedroom. Ah, rush hour, the best and worst of humanity.

“Delta, Sem, Vosem, Alpha, Sto, Chetyre, Indigo, Odin, Sierra, Tri, Pyatnadtzat, Yankee.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. Daisy, loud and clear, and I didn’t understand how. It couldn’t be. Surely? I craned my neck to try and spot something out of the ordinary in the crowd, though I had no idea what I was looking for. The crackling radio static gave way to the familiar noise of the ocean and a bell. It was distant enough that when I spied an old radio on the shelf of the crammed convenience store in the dark corner of the station, a cold certainty swept over me.

My feet started moving before I even realised what was happening, weaving through the crowd until I could read the labels on the multipacks of chocolate bars that were being sold separately. The man behind the counter didn’t seem to realise what was playing from his radio, or if he did, he didn’t give any indication that he cared. He was sitting on a step stool in the corner reading the newspaper.

“Can I have a KitKat?” I mumbled, picking up the closest chocolate bar to me. He looked up from his newspaper, his brown eyes flicking over my appearance before discounting me.

“One pound fifty,” he said, and I pulled out my phone. “Cash only. Card machine broken.” The card machine didn’t look broken to me, but before I could say anything, Daisy began her next section, and I felt too cold to argue.

“Nol, Sem, Chetyre, Hotel Whiskey, Tri, Hotel, Whiskey, Pyat,”

I fumbled for my wallet and dropped two pound coins onto the counter. I took the KitKat and ran, as fast as I could through the crowd. I took one look back at the man behind the counter and saw him fish through the cash drawer, and instead of Daisy, the radio was playing regular music. No trace of Russian or the ocean or something else to be heard. I felt I was going to be sick.

***

By the time I finished my shift at work, I felt like I needed to be sectioned. Every time I passed by a radio or speaker, I could hear ocean waves, or the chimes and beeps of Daisy’s header, and once, just once, I thought I actually heard her speak. A chime, waves, three more discordant notes of a piano, and then that fucking voice, garbled through radio static.

“Are You Receiving?”

I bolted out of the office and jammed my headphones on.  I needed to drown out the sound of the security guard’s radio, the noise was beginning to feel like my own personal death knell.

I returned home in a panicked blur, that primitive sense of safety in returning to a space that was yours, something I had been desperate for. But when I stepped inside my little flat and set my bag down, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

The radio was on. The radio that I unplugged was on.

“Delta Alpha Indigo Sierra Yankee.” 

I trembled like a leaf in a windstorm, and my feet took me down the hall without my conscious decision. I had tried to outrun the radiowaves all day, but that was the thing about shortwave radio. Anyone could tune in, from anywhere, and anyone could broadcast out.

“Stop it,” I whispered, as my hand clutched the cold metal of the door handle, and pushed the door open. The bedroom was dark, as I had left it. The curtains were drawn, and my sheets were in disarray on the bed. All aside from the radio that was illuminating the room with its single green light, the plug sitting innocently on the floor away from the wall.

“Delta Alpha Indigo Sierra Yankee. Are You Receiving?” I was going insane. That was the only explanation, I was going insane and hallucinating Daisy talking to me. I had spent too much time alone on too little sleep.

“Yes– Yes I am receiving– God– shut up!” 

Daisy chimed in triplicate, and I pressed myself flat against the door like I could melt into it and escape.

“Short. Even. Water.”That horrible noise that meant she was about to start again beeped. “Short. Even. Water.” 

“I don’t– I don’t understand what the fuck this means.”

“Short. Even. Water.” 

My legs slipped out from under me and I hit the floor. I put my head in my hands as Daisy grew louder, repeating those stupid three words over and over.

Three words.

I pulled out my phone and plugged the phrase into what three words. It was an insane idea, it didn’t make any sense, but I got a location, near the Thames bank in Sands End. I didn’t care if I was right about what Daisy was trying to tell me, or if she was telling me anything at all. Or if any of this was real, even. It had to stop. I grabbed my keys and ran out into the night.

***

Once upon a time the Thames had been known as the silver river for the way the sun bounced off its rippling surface and shone like liquid silver. Nowadays the river was shit brown and more plastic and corpses than fish. My shoes slapped against wet concrete as I hurried to the spot I had marked on my phone. I couldn’t hear Daisy out here. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I slowed and peered down the edge of the bank and into narrow alleyways. 

This was stupid. I stopped, sat on a bench and put my head in my hands. God, what an idiot. This was all for nothing, and I was still afraid to go home. The waves of the Thames lapped against its slim sandy banks. I forgot that the river was tidal, that it was pulled by the moon. The sound of the waves grew louder, like they were crashing against the barriers of the bank. I stood, afraid they were going to splash over the top and soak me, but they stayed gentle and lapping at the silt. The noises weren’t coming from the river at all.

“Are You Receiving?”

The signal had found me, or perhaps this time I had found it. I turned and looked for the direction of it, searching for anything out of the ordinary, and spied a dim green light coming from a slightly ajar door. The building looked abandoned with large cracks in patched up plaster on the outside, and the windows covered in newspaper. The door seemed to creak open wider at my approach. It was beckoning me in with a metal whine, and I let it close behind me. 

The walls might have been beige, or brown or white, but they were bathed in a blinking green light that grew steadily stronger with every step I took. Everything else about the building, broken glass littering the feet of boarded up windows, the strong scent of mildew and bleach, the way the floorboards groaned underfoot like they’d give way at any moment, it all faded into the background. It wasn’t important anymore.

“Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer, do”

I grabbed the peeling paint-covered bannister and began to descend down the rickety stairs to the basement, my eyes fighting to adjust to the darkness. 

“I’m half crazy. All for the love of you.”

At the bottom of the stairs was a corridor that ended with a plain metal door with rusted hinges and a plexiglass window where the green light emanated from. I smelled salt and rot, and the carpet squished under my feet.

“It won’t be a stylish marriage. I cannot afford a carriage.”

 Water rushed and roared in my ears, and my socks felt cold as damp seeped in through the seams of my shoes.

“But you’ll look sweet upon the seat.”

I opened the door.

“Of a bicycle built for two.”

There was nobody there.

The room was cramped and surprisingly normal. The wallpaper was old-fashioned florals, and metal bookshelves lined half the walls, the other half taken up by a large desk covered in audio equipment. The long-range radio transmitter was wired up with a dozen cords that skittered up the corner of the room like a spider’s web and disappeared into a hole in the ceiling. The faded brown leather desk chair was facing me. It was empty. There was nobody sending these signals. I had been listening to no one. The smallest glimmer of hope that I had had, that there might be something more to this, something as stupid as it might be that could have led me to Mark died, and grief rose up in my throat all over again.

Daisy was still singing.

With a hitching sob and stinging eyes, I sat in the chair; I needed to take a moment to catch my breath. The carpet smelled so strongly of mold and chemicals it was making me dizzy, and I had to put my head between my knees so I didn’t vomit. There were headphones laying on the desktop with large foam cups and a thin wire connector. I reached for them without meaning to, and then I put them on.

And Daisy stopped singing. 

I hadn’t realised how loud it had been until it was blessedly quiet. With Daisy silent at long last, I could hear my breaths panting, the trickle of rain outside as a cloud burst, the way the chair creaked under me as I shifted. I reached up to take off the headphones and see if my reprieve would be permanent, but when I tugged they wouldn’t move. 

I tugged harder, pulling at my hair and skin, and harder still until it hurt. The headphones were stuck to my head and connected to the ceiling. I tried to scramble to my feet and pull, but my legs wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t even twitch.

“It won’t be a stylish marriage.”

“No–no no no you can’t– this isn’t– please–” Blood dripped down my face as I tugged on the headphones hard enough to tear my skin and blind me with white-hot pain.

“I cannot afford a carriage–”

“Let me go let me go– let me go–” I was screaming, but I couldn’t hear my own voice over the sound of the ocean waves and the chimes– the awful terrible chimes of the header. Who was sending the header if there was nobody in this room but me?

“But you’ll look sweet, upon the seat–”

I sobbed and twitched as my fingers grew slippery with claret and stopped getting purchase on the metal, as the headphones stopped even flexing with my flesh, like they were fused to the skin. Daisy had been quiet because I had done what she had wanted, and no one knew where I was.

“Of a bicycle built for two.”

Wren Faulkner-Bird‘s fascination with horror has been a longstanding obsession for decades. They’re a trainee solicitor living in Norfolk with their darling wife Indrid, and that love for all things dark and morbid is a madness shared by two.